Detection of the horizontal and gravity directions of an image can be used in vehicle rollover warning, image tilt detection and so on, wherein the image tilt detection can be used in such applications as automatic scanning of images and image correction.
In the field of vehicle control, rollover prevention is an important aspect. The existing vision-based methods usually employ specific reference objects or are based on prior knowledge of the known environments, so they are suitable for highly structured road environments, but these methods lack universality and adaptability in unknown environments.
On the other hand, the methods that use the widely-employed inertial navigation system for roll attitude estimation so as to prevent rollover has the problem of error accumulation in addition to its high cost.
As far as automatic scanning of images and image correction are concerned, the prior arts mostly focus on detecting tilt angles of the text images, while for non-text images, there is no universal solution.